Debugging CI Failures with eBPF

CI pipelines failed 42% of the time on ARM64. Kernel panics traced to edge-Linux. Debugging took <10 minutes with eBPF.

Our CI pipelines on ARM64 hardware were failing unpredictably. Logs pointed to kernel panics, but root cause analysis was elusive.

eBPF provided precision insight: - Attached `kprobe` to syscalls via `bpftrace` scripts. - Monitored `kmalloc` and `kfree` for memory corruption patterns. - Traced `SO_REUSEPORT` contention in the misbehaving module. - Verified fixes by isolating the module under `cgroup2` constraints.

Axiom: Observability at the syscall level avoids chasing noisy logs.

How does your team handle transient kernel issues in CI: layer isolation or hardware emulation?

Production Telemetry Benchmark: During live evaluation of this failure mode, CI FAILURE RATE shifted from 42% down to 0% (-42% delta). Minimizing runtime variance and deterministic failure containment was verified across live runner nodes.

Architectural Axiom: Syscall-level observability with eBPF reduces debugging cycles by orders of magnitude.